Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers
Forest fires continue to cause considerable social and economic damage. Fortunately, the emergence of new robotics technologies, including capable autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, may help improve wildfire management in the near future. In this paper, we characterize the number of vehicles requi...
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Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
2018
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Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115398 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1304-7708 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2225-7275 |
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author | Somanath, Amith Karaman, Sertac Youcef-Toumi, Kamal |
author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics |
author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Somanath, Amith Karaman, Sertac Youcef-Toumi, Kamal |
author_sort | Somanath, Amith |
collection | MIT |
description | Forest fires continue to cause considerable social and economic damage. Fortunately, the emergence of new robotics technologies, including capable autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, may help improve wildfire management in the near future. In this paper, we characterize the number of vehicles required to combat wildfires, using a percolation-theoretic analysis that originated in the mathematical physics community. We model the wildfire as a stochastic growth process on a square lattice, where the local growth probabilities depend on the presence of robotic fire-extinguishing vehicles. We develop two control policies: First treats only a fraction of burning nodes at a given time, and the second treats burning nodes only at finite time intervals. We characterize the conditions under which these policies can stabilize a wildfire, i.e., ensure the fire stops eventually almost surely. We also provide computational results which demonstrate our theoretical analysis. |
first_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:06:34Z |
format | Article |
id | mit-1721.1/115398 |
institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
last_indexed | 2024-09-23T11:06:34Z |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) |
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spelling | mit-1721.1/1153982022-09-27T17:11:32Z Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers Somanath, Amith Karaman, Sertac Youcef-Toumi, Kamal Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering Somanath, Amith Karaman, Sertac Youcef-Toumi, Kamal Forest fires continue to cause considerable social and economic damage. Fortunately, the emergence of new robotics technologies, including capable autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, may help improve wildfire management in the near future. In this paper, we characterize the number of vehicles required to combat wildfires, using a percolation-theoretic analysis that originated in the mathematical physics community. We model the wildfire as a stochastic growth process on a square lattice, where the local growth probabilities depend on the presence of robotic fire-extinguishing vehicles. We develop two control policies: First treats only a fraction of burning nodes at a given time, and the second treats burning nodes only at finite time intervals. We characterize the conditions under which these policies can stabilize a wildfire, i.e., ensure the fire stops eventually almost surely. We also provide computational results which demonstrate our theoretical analysis. National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1350685) 2018-05-16T15:17:19Z 2018-05-16T15:17:19Z 2015-02 2014-12 2018-03-22T17:36:47Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/ConferencePaper 978-1-4673-6090-6 978-1-4799-7746-8 978-1-4799-7745-1 http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115398 Somanath, Amith, et al. "Controlling Stochastic Growth Processes on Lattices: Wildfire Management with Robotic Fire Extinguishers." 2014 IEEE 53rd Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 15-17 December, 2014, Los Angeles, California, IEEE, 2014, pp. 1432–37. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1304-7708 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2225-7275 http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/CDC.2014.7039602 2014 IEEE 53rd Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) MIT Web Domain |
spellingShingle | Somanath, Amith Karaman, Sertac Youcef-Toumi, Kamal Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers |
title | Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers |
title_full | Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers |
title_fullStr | Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers |
title_full_unstemmed | Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers |
title_short | Controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices: Wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers |
title_sort | controlling stochastic growth processes on lattices wildfire management with robotic fire extinguishers |
url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/115398 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1304-7708 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2225-7275 |
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